My name is Nathan. It's Hebrew for "Gift from God." I fully understand that God put me on earth for a reason, but I sure don't know what that reason is. I don't have a lot of friends, though, for most of the few I do have, I trust completely. I enjoy a lot of things, but don't find true joy in anything except the occasions where God forces his way into my messed up heart just to give me a hug, tell me He loves me, and drag me back onto the path I'm supposed to be following.
To throw a quick intro about myself out there, right now, I'm an 18-year-old freshman at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, which is almost 600 miles from where I grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. I'm the oldest of five kids, and I was homeschooled all twelve years, which had a lot benefits, but also hurt my chances at developing true friendships. I study math and sports management because I want to be a baseball statistician after school, but I spend a lot of my free time reading, writing poetry and prose, and playing music. I played baseball for ten years and loved it, but it was very obvious that playing it was not God's plan for my life after high school. I've always been good at math, but it was my junior year of high school in calculus that I fell in love with it. One the most incredible feelings to do in my life is solve complex integrals, forcing my brain to piece together a strategy and attack the problem head-on, brandishing my feeble concept of a solution as if the mechanical pencil in my hand can become a weapon against anything my professor can throw at me. Thus, baseball statistics is a pretty logical decision, at least for someone who defies logic as swiftly and smoothly as I do. So, yeah, I'm weird, and there are plenty of times that sucks, but there is still an amount of pride that comes from not fitting in any kind of box society tries to put over my head.
My biggest passion in serving God is helping hurting, underprivileged kids improve their life on earth, but, more importantly, find a real relationship with Jesus Christ. I love tutoring and seeing kids succeed in school, because I enjoy learning so much and want to see others experience that same feeling.
My emotions have been an issue for me most of my life. A big problem with that is that I try to bottle them up until I just can't hold it back any longer and go off, usually against my family. The easiest emotion to store is anger, because it's compact and powerful, and can be stored for a long time. Thus, I just turn most of what I feel into anger and frustration to hold it in longer. Just like anything else under pressure, though, my anger eventually bursts, and whatever emotions I should have originally felt come blasting out as nothing but hate and bitterness. Knowing this also increases my stress level because I'm worried about losing control and saying things I can't take back. This stress is just like putting a seal on a pot of water. It makes it harder for the water to boil by increasing the pressure as the temperature goes up. It also makes the explosion way more powerful when the water finally does reach its boiling point.
I ask a lot of questions about myself, and usually find that the more I look in the proverbial mirror, the more what I see becomes blurry. The trick to becoming even more confused about who I am is to bottle up my emotions, then, right before they turn muddled, let them come rushing out and erode the shell I'd built of what I though I was.
I never really liked writing in school, especially high school. Everything was formal, but not precise. I had to find the box I was supposed to be in, then stay there. It wasn't math, where my only job is to find a straight line and follow it, but it wasn't pure creativity either. Then, I tried poetry, which spawned writing for the sake writing. Being able to just write whatever comes to me, then revisit those thoughts later to see how I actually think and feel is incredible. There aren't words to really describe what a person feels emotionally and spiritually, but I've found that just trying makes everything that much easier to, if not simplify, at least comprehend.
My goal with this blog is to take whatever comes to me and let whoever accidentally finds this page read it. If God uses it to help someone, then that's great. If nobody ever has the time to read what I write, then this is just me hitting a send button after typing what I needed to write anyways.
That's basically all I have right now, so I'll stop before I start rambling.
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